The e-commerce market in the United States is one of the fastest growing sectors of the Internet economy. The growth rate of this sector is so staggering that many U.S. merchants (e.g., any enterprise including insurance, finance, banks, travel, real estate, human resources, medical, and other enterprises or businesses, etc.) find themselves unable to adapt to the needs of their customers. Countless times, an uninformed on-line customer, faced with a decision on whether to purchase a product or service. is unable to retrieve further information about the product or service from a merchant's web site. The customer may be required to send an e-mail to the merchant or be directed to a phone number whereby the customer can call a sales-representative of the merchant. However, most customers prefer to retrieve further information about a particular product or service in real time while they are at the merchant's site. It is in the interest of the merchant to be able to push product or service information to a customer as quickly and easily as possible or risk losing an impatient customer to a competitor's product or service.
The largest problem that merchants face is developing a real-time comprehensive on-line customer service solution that will be sufficient for the scope of the Internet. Other major problems merchants must contend with include pushing product information to their customers, customer profiling and monitoring to develop a lasting customer relationship, difficulties in web site navigation and the security fears customers have prior to making an on-line purchase. There is a need for a real-time e-commerce customer relations management solution whereby consumers are encouraged to ask product questions, can readily retrieve product information and where merchants can develop a lasting relationship with their customers. There is also a need for an interface between customers and sales representatives that eases the security fears that many customers have prior to making a purchase, and that facilitates the consummation of a secure sales transaction on-line.
Further complicating the e-commerce market is the recent surge in on-line wireless customers beginning to take hold in the United States. Wireless usage in the U.S. and globally is experiencing a phenomenal surge in growth. More people use wireless devices on a daily basis to access their communications and data needs. The Cellular Telecommunications Industry Association (CTIA) posted a statistic that about a third of all Americans now have cell phones and there are new users signing up at the rate of every two seconds—a year-by-year growth rate of 25 percent. Strategy Analytics predicts that there will be 525 million Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) enabled mobile phones by the year 2003.
Several other developments will also fuel the on-line wireless craze among mobile phone users. These include an AT&T wireless announcement to offer free mobile Internet access to its mobile phone subscribers, similar offerings from competitors, and the emergence of 3G mobile phone data networks in the U.S. and globally.
The culmination of increased subscription, free service offerings, and better mobile data networks will bring an increasingly large number of content providers to on-line mobile phone and other wireless device users. The increased content causes a need for a better electronic customer service solution and data/communications sharing method, system and apparatus.